Data bound controls

Data bound controls


Hello all,
I have started playing with jQuery and jQuery UI recently in the past
few months and am quite impressed with the framework. Especially the
CSS themeing in jQuery UI 1.7.. 'm impressed so much that I'm
abandoning my old framework that I've written over the past 4 years
and switching/integrating jQuery/UI into my app framework.
Now, the one thing that I have that jQuery UI does not currently have
is rich data bound controls. (I will setup a demo next week for those
interested to play with it). My control framework currently supports
the following controls.
* Edit Control
* Combobox
* Search Box
* Date picker
* Time picker (using analog clock)
* combo date/time picker
* large text area
* checkboxes
the basic edit controls (edit, combobox, and searchbox) all support an
auto-complete/suggest style interface as well as a full "drop" list.
The databound system also support "fills" and rich dependencies. An
example flow is like this.
1) User selects a company from a RO drop box
2) the selection enables several new controls including the a caller,
and an asset.
3) picking a caller (either by typing the name using auto-complete or
opening the search box) fills their name, email, and phone number,
along with an optional "default" asset.
4) picking an asset (or being filled by the picking of the caller), of
course, fills in the location, and other asset information fields.
etc..
I am wanting to rewriite/overhaul the system to jQuery UI in a way
that,
a) doesn't require PHP to kick start the mess (currently all controls,
dependencies, and data binding is setup in a PHP framework), and thus
allow any server language to provide the "data binding"
b) allows significantly cleaner setup of the controls and more dynamic
setup of controls (currently my framework cannot dynamically build
controls at runtime)
c) still allow the great flexibility in design, but cleaner, and right
now it's extended in way too many points, and I could significantly
reduce the extension points and still allow the flexibility.
I would like to know if there is any interest in something like this
in jQuery UI, as I would like input from others, I also would like to
have this code be PART of jQuery UI instead of a separate library. I
will be dedicating around a day or two a week to this endeavor.